I started watching videos about primitive pottery making years ago. There is something very soothing about watching someone dig up mud, strain and sift it to make a pliable clay, then turning that clay into pottery. I suspect that if I lived in a more rural location I’d have a kiln in my backyard and I’d be raku firing pots.
Instead I live in a city where my mini Solo stove knock off gets the side eye.
The primative pottery making led me to videos about making my own ink and paint from foraged stuff like leaves, fruit, berries, and walnuts as well as rocks.
I started my foray into making my own paint by visiting a beach I love and picking out some softer rocks that I could break with another rock and left marks on harder rocks. I then brought that home and broke them into smaller, coffee bean sized pieces with a sledge hammer.
Very therapeutic. I highly recommend the process.
I then used a variety of means to crush those pieces down into smaller pieces and smaller pieces until they were little more than dust.
I started out with a mortar and pestle. Then used a whirly coffee grinder. Then an old magic bullet blender. I’ve settled into an old manual coffee grinder with a stainless steel conical burr. I attach the manual coffee grinder to a drill and use power to grind the stone to espresso sized dust. I have not tried the coffee grinder with harder rocks, only an ochre. The whirly coffee grinder has been ground DOWN by harder rocks.
This gets dumped into my mortar and pestle for a final pass before the wet portion starts.
Upper right are my own pigments. This car is mostly painted with my own rock based pigments!
The next step is levigation. Basically using water and swirling to get the heavier particles out and only the finest particles into a slurry that will then be strained through a coffee filter.
Levigation removes not only the largest particles but stuff that won’t grind down and contaminants. I end up losing at least half of the ground up rock to levigation.
Anything that gets levigated out ends up back in the mortar and reground with the pestle. I want to get every drop of potential color out of the grind as possible, but I also don’t want to spend days doing it. Honestly, one could go a little wild with the crushing, grinding, and levigating. I’ve decided that I’m going to lose a fair amount of potential pigment no matter what I do.
I’ve made a wide variety of colors of paint from a variety of rocks. Some are very interesting- a pink from a pink rock, some stuff that looks a lot like raw sienna and some stuff that looks a lot like yellow ochre. One of my favorites is from a few chunks of brick I found next to a very old building. It made the most lovely red brown color.
The most recent exploration is into carbon blacks, which I think deserves a post of it’s own. It’s a delightfully messy project where I’ve made lamp black and my own charcoal. I really want to make my own compressed charcoal sticks from sticks and twigs from my own yard and from my various hikes and bike rides.
A word of caution, when grinding down rocks or charcoal or processing lamp black, wear a mask. A good mask too. I’ve been wearing a N95 and feel like I should probably invest in a good respirator. Rocks can contain a whole load of things I don’t want to breath in, but also dust particles of any kind are not great for lungs, so I shall always wear a mask and eye protection.
More pictures soon, I’ve been really bad at taking photos of this process.